Marina Carter

Empire and locality: a global dimension to the 1857 Indian Uprising

The Indian Uprising of 1857–59, during which thousands of Indian soldiers serving in the British army mutinied, joined by many civilians, led to the identification of a vast number of ‘rebels’ and discussions as to the most appropriate means of punishing them. The wholesale transportation of insurgents was considered a likely scenario in the charged atmosphere of late 1857. The uprising coincided with dramatic increases in the world market price for sugar, prompting British colonial producers to extend cultivation of cane and their political agents to suggest that the need for further plantation labour be met from among the likely Indian convict transportees. The empire-wide response to the events in India during 1857–59 is assessed in this article as an interesting case study of both reactions to a sensationalist news story and the manner in which British officials, keen to exploit the outcome of the revolt and to manipulate the labour market to the advantage of their respective colonies, competed with and contradicted one another. At the same time, the authors contend that arguably the more interesting aspects of the relationship between the Indian Uprising and the surge in numbers migrating to the sugar colonies were either neglected or carefully ignored by policy makers and commentators alike at the time, and have scarcely been investigated by historians since. The article suggests that many individuals who participated in the insurgency in India did indeed make their way overseas, quietly ignored, and only mentioned in subsequent decades when ‘scares’ about mutineer sepoys in their midst were raised in the colonial press as explanation for strikes and labour agitations on colonial sugar estates.

Forcing the archive: involuntary migrants ‘of Ceylon’ in the Indian Ocean World of the 18–19th centuries

ABSTRACT This article examines some marginal stories of subaltern individuals shipped and trans-shipped between the Dutch and British colonial territories of Ceylon, Mauritius and the Cape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After addressing the difficulties in retrieving traces of their lives and the ambiguities of categories of classification, the article offers insights into everyday cultural ties forged among diverse groups and looks into acts of resistance of individuals ‘of Ceylon’. The experience of Ceylonese or individuals described as ‘of Ceylon’ not only gives insights into the various forms of mobility that shaped the making of societies in the Indian Ocean world, it also helps us capture the remarkable capacity of some of these involuntary migrants to forge fragile communities, preserve practices of meaning and resist the predations of slave owners. The snapshots we offer of people ‘of Ceylon’ can refine our understanding of the way imperial designs affected the lives of dominated people across territories in the Indian Ocean. They also make more explicit the link between the global and the local and how larger processes such as slavery are broken down and lived at the local level.

Pulled through Time: Art and the Indian Labour Migrant

This paper discusses the processes through which historical research, visual archives, and artistic production have interacted to produce a series of original artworks capturing some of the complexities of Indian indentured migrants’ experiences and identities. The images from the ‘Coolitude’ series by award-winning artist Danny Flynn apply modern screen-printing techniques to archival photographs of Indian indentured labourers. The artistic reimagining of these historical images was inspired by the ideas of Mauritian poet Khal Torabully and the work of the historical research project, ‘Becoming Coolies: Rethinking the Origins of the Indian Ocean Labour Diaspora’. The latter attempts to reinterpret the colonial Indian labour diaspora by drawing upon accounts of migrants themselves to reassess the mechanisms of migration and reassign subjectivity and agency to Indian labour migrants’ experiences. The artworks themselves seek to interrogate and challenge the stereotypical image of the so-called ‘coolie’, presenting a more nuanced view of the Indian labour migrant. This paper discusses the creation of the visual archive from which the original images are drawn, as well as the conceptual and creative processes that underpin their reimagining as original works of art.

Sirdars as intermediaries in nineteenth century Indian Ocean indentured labour migration

The sirdar (also termed sardar and jobber in Indian historiography)—foreman, recruiter, at once a labour leader and an important intermediary figure for the employers of labour both in India and in the sugar colonies—is reassessed in this article. Tithankar Roys thoughtful 2007 article looked at how the sirdars’ multiple roles represent an incorporation of traditional authority in a modern setting, giving rise to certain contradictions. In 2010 Samita Sen, conversely, developed Rajnarayan Chandavarkars argument about the use of labour intermediaries in colonial India to reveal how, in the case of the Assam tea plantations, the nexus between contractors and sirdars belies the ‘benign’ role often accorded to the intermediary within narratives from the tea industry. This article provides examples from the overseas labour destinations in the Indian Ocean region, particularly Mauritius, to further develop and nuance the debate, through an assessment of the complexity of sirdari roles in the colonial Indian labour diaspora.

Towards a workers’ history of the Chagos archipelago

ABSTRACT The article presents a critical investigation of the historiography of the Chagos archipelago and in particular the expelled islanders, known as Ilois, and more recently as Chagossians. A brief survey of the discovery and settlement of the atolls is provided, along with a more detailed summary of key events in the history of workers on the archipelago from the late-eighteenth to mid-twentieth century. Finally, the paper discusses the challenges of framing a workers’ history characterized by exploitation and marginalization alongside the romanticized collective representation of life in the archipelago which has been adopted as a ‘narrative of exile’ by the Chagossians.